It has become practice among telephone service operators to provide value enhancing features to their customers. Two such features, voicemail and fax deposit, can be associated with a customer's telephone line. For example, many telephone systems provide functionality intended to divert calls to ensure satisfactory call completion. Instead of presenting a caller with busy tones, endless ringing, or some other signal indicating that the caller will not be connected with the called party, telephone system operators provide call completion services like voicemail, which allows the caller to leave a message to be retrieved at a later time by the called party.
To invoke call diversion, telephone operators rely most heavily on two features: Call Forward No Answer (CFNA) and Call Forward Busy (CFB). In Call Forward No Answer, the telephone system allows the caller ring tones for a set duration, typically the duration that the called party's phone is made to ring, before diverting the caller to the call completion service. In Call Forward Busy, the telephone system detects that the telephone line is already in use, forwarding the caller to the call completion service immediately. More specifically, when a caller makes a call to a called party and the called party is using the telephone, the calling party is switched to a call processing system that answers the telephone, e.g., a voice mail system.
Some voicemail systems provide fax functionality. In these systems, a user can send a fax using a telephone number of a customer and the voicemail with the fax functionality. The voicemail system receives the call and allows a fax message to be deposited. However, since this functionality is associated with the main voice number of the customer, a fax depositor would first need to call the customer and ask the customer to not answer the phone until the fax has been deposited. This behavior is clumsy, and it helps to undermine the value of the fax feature for some users. Similarly, users sometimes only want to leave a voicemail rather than talk to the owner of the voicemail account. Thus, the caller would prefer to communicate with the call processing system so that the caller can immediately leave a voicemail or deposit a fax. Present technologies leave control entirely in the hands of the called party because the called party makes the decision whether to take the call.
Accordingly, there is a need to bypass the called party and connect with the call processing system associated with the called party.